


don't think

by bukkunkun



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Universe - Captive Prince Fusion, Confessions, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Sexual Tension, Slavery, Slow Romance, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 11:12:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8011438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bukkunkun/pseuds/bukkunkun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Don’t… toy with me.” Leo sounded weak, winded with breathlessness. Nothing like his usual self in court. “I—have not the means to—” he floundered, his hands balling into fists against Ryoma’s chest. “Defend against this.”</p>
<p>a Captive Prince fusion that's ridiculously loyal to the source material.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't think

**Author's Note:**

> OK SO LET'S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY I COULDN'T GET THEM TO CANOODLE BECAUSE I HIT 7 PAGES ON MY GDOC AND I WAS T I R E D OF TRYING TO GET THEM TO FUCK
> 
> if people want me to get them to fuck then i guess i can stick it in the next chapter but right now i just Can't :^))))
> 
> ok so you may need to have read the books for this because i'll be referencing a whole bunch of shit i don't have the energy to explain (i.e. leo/laurent's shoulder scar from his one-on-one fight with hans/govart)
> 
> OK SO SPURRED BY THE DELIGHT THAT [THE RYOULEO SUPPORTS](http://unassumingvenusaur.tumblr.com/post/150232391380/ryoma-x-leo-full-c-s-supports) ARE SOON TO BE IMPLEMENTED IN THE GAY FATES HACK BY THE AMAZING [UNASSUMINGVENUSAUR](http://unassumingvenusaur.tumblr.com/)!!!! ~~parent/child supports + sibling supports to follow, i promise,,,~~
> 
> i'd actually been writing this for a while now but i dropped it because i forgot about it but now i finally!!!! got down to continuing hahah
> 
> i wanted to make a captive prince au but i didn't have the energy ~~nor the time~~ for a full multichap so i'l lend up doing a bunch of scenes that i just really liked from the books :^))))) sorry :^)))))))

Evenings in Mokushu were warm, humid with insects occupying every surface you could lay a hand on, but Ryoma didn’t bother with any of that.

He couldn’t, not when news of what happened in Shirasagi still shook him to the core. Hinoka, dethroned and imprisoned, Sakura, betrothed to a Regent he would rather wring by the neck and hang at the castle’s wall than to let him so much as _breathe_ in her general direction. He didn’t even know if Takumi and Mikoto were given proper burial rites, and anger boiled low in his stomach.

Not even the overwhelming Hoshidan victory ( _siege_ , his mind corrected) on the Nohrian-occupied Sevenfold Sanctuary and Port Dia could soothe him. The memory of the herald’s blood, fresh and warm on his hands, still stuck to him, and he rubbed his hands together, half-expecting the stickiness of liquid iron, only to find it no longer there.

His absence in Hoshido had thrown his beautiful home into chaos. He had only known happiness, of peace and love back at home, hopeful for a future where there would be no bloodshed, but the war had torn his hopes apart. The hundreds of arrows in his father. Nohr’s loss at Cheve, of more than just land—of both its King and Crown Prince. The coup. Enslaved by Hoshidan hands, and gifted like a wild animal to an even wilder, cruel prince. So much has happened, and Ryoma wondered if he was no longer the same man he used to be.

A sound at the door caught his attention, and he whirled around to see Leo stepping in through the doorway.

Ryoma took a shuddering breath. And then there was Leo, as well. He could handle this. He knew what to say—

“Not now,” Leo said, voice lacking the bite of its usual snake-like venom as he shut the door behind him. “I’m just—I’m here.”

Ryoma paused, the gentleness in Leo’s voice shaking him to clarity. It had been hours since the Hoshidan herald. Not a single servant, or Nohrian slave attended to him. Not a single soldier approached his quarters, not even Saizo, or Niles. Someone blocked the world out for him as he mourned his grievances.

“You.” He simply said, and Leo looked to the side, crossing his arms as he puffed out his cheeks unconsciously, so much more unguarded alone in a room with Ryoma to keep up courtly pretenses. He was as highly-strung as he was. “ _You_.” He repeated intelligently, and that finally coaxed a huff of laughter from the blond.

Leo had guarded his solitude, offering him the moments of precious peace he so desperately needed. Leo had kept everyone at bay, all the servants, frightened of the foreign prince, all the slaves, out of servitude their master. Ryoma sighed deeply, and he found himself incredibly grateful for it.

He opened his mouth to speak again, but Leo was already crossing the room, and Ryoma jumped to feel cold fingers at his nape, twining with his hair before he was pulled forward. Uncomfortably, awkwardly, shakily, Leo lowered Ryoma’s head toward his, and it was so… _simple._

So _stupidly_ simple.

His eyes slid shut, and he simply let himself _feel_. The welcome warmth in the arms as he pulled the blond close, the welcome warmth against his lips, the soft sound of approval he coaxed out of the younger man. Ryoma hadn’t had a chance to enjoy solace like this in a long time.

Ever since the battlements in Fort Dragonfall, he thought to himself. He’d missed this. He’d missed their intimacy, the tenderness they shared that one night before Ryoma the slave died to give way to King Ryoma, Prince-Killer.

The memory was bittersweet, more bitter than sweet, yet as Leo shifted against him, it was more sweet than bitter. And then more bitter than sweet. Pain always made everything fluctuate, Ryoma thought, much like Nohrian sensibilities. Everything was always so needlessly complicated.

They parted, but only superficially. Ryoma could feel Leo’s presence wrap around him like a comforting blanket, as he wrapped himself around the lithe body, holding it close as he buried his face into a smooth neck, smelling those gods-forsaken Nohrian roses that both infuriated him and made warmth bubble pleasantly in his belly.

Time passed, and he simply held onto him. Like a child unwilling to part with a favourite toy.

“Now you’re just taking advantage of my benevolent streak.” Leo murmured warmly, and he felt it more than heard it. Still he managed a chuckle, and he pulled the blond with him until they were sat on the bed, Leo at a more awkward angle than Ryoma, still hugging him like a pillow, but he paid little mind to it.

“Oh, Nohrian sensibilities. Always expecting equal returns of kindness.” He said, kissing the side of Leo’s neck before pulling away. Leo looked back up at him, impassive, allowing Ryoma to project what he wanted on him.

He didn't say a word, waiting for Ryoma to speak.

The brunet sighed and pressed their foreheads together.

“My kingdom is dying.”

The words weighed heavily on his mind, like a judge passing a guilty verdict. The words had a finality of sorts to them, an admission buried within the sentence loaded with grief, disbelief and righteous anger.

Leo remained silent.

“You thought we were savages. Heathens, without a sense of civility, without an honour code and justice. Weak, in the face of hardship and war, thanks to the blessings of the sun and the Dawn Dragon.”

“No,” the blond said. “Don't talk about this now.”

But Ryoma was stubborn as he was sensitive.

“Barbarians pretending to be people. You hated us.”

“I hated _you_ ,” Leo corrected him. “I hated you so much it killed me every moment you breathed. If Iago hadn't stopped me then, I would have run you through myself.”

_And soil Brynhildr’s holy magic with more blood,_ went by unsaid.

“But then you refused the pets thrown at you. You bargained your pride and honour for your countrymen. And you saved my _life,_ ” snarled like a curse. “So many times. Over, and over, and over. Whenever I needed you—”

Camus. Hans. The Hoshidans from the border skirmish. Ryoma remembered them all. He remembered the fear in Leo’s eyes, the way his hand reached for him instinctively, a boyish desperation clear for a presence in need of a strong hand to hold on.

“—you were there. Every single time. And I hated you for that too.”

Ryoma held him a fraction of a breath closer, as if trying to meld them together, until he could not tell where he ended and Leo began.

“I killed your brother.”

A sword, through Xander’s heart, and the look of defeat, of worry, but not horror, crossing his eyes. Ryoma remembers realising Xander died thinking of his little brother. How he would go on without him. How he would no longer be there to protect him.

He kissed the side of Leo’s head, as if to promise to finish what Xander had started.

“What are you doing here?” He asked, after a long, stretched moment of tight silence.

“I know what it's like to lose everything.”

Everything, he says. _Everything_ was relative.

To Ryoma, it was his home. His family, his happiness. Peace, for his kingdom, for his life.

To Leo, it was Xander. It had always been just Xander.

Outside, the world felt like it was dead. The silence of the departed hung over the air, silencing Mokushu, where even a single leaf rustled in the trees outside. No guards stood shuffling on their feet at the door, no servant was scuttling around at an order of the Master’s. It was like the world had died to leave only Leo and Ryoma alone in a room, holding each other, breathing deeply, each breath broken glass and bleeding.

“Is there no way forward for us?” He asked, to break the silence, to hear anything other than the slow beat of his heart and the even breaths of the blond in his arms.

Leo pulled away from him, and his arms dropped to his waist in a gentle hold, reluctant to part from him. Leo held himself very still, his expression carefully schooled to one of cold indifference as he turned his face ever so slightly away from Ryoma.

“You mean, will I come back to your bed in the little time we have left together?” He asked, and it was Leo the Crown Prince again speaking to him. Not the vulnerable young man who opened his heart out to him, bleeding out pain and grief.

Ryoma shook his head, cupping Leo’s face with one hand. He watched him flinch, before slowly, hesitantly, relaxing into the warmth. Leaning into it, almost, yet he did not lift his eyes to look into his. Ryoma made no move to turn his head, simply holding it there, leaving the decision made to Leo himself.

“I mean that we hold the crossroads. From Fort Dragonfall, to Mokushu. The Wolfskin answer to you, and the Kitsune, to me. The sea is ours. Can we not call it a kingdom and rule it together? Am I such a terrible choice over a Nohrian noble with the same ambitions as Iago does?”

The words tumbled out of his mouth, spilling like water from a broken dam. He stopped himself before he could say more, betraying more than what he already bared to Leo in that proposition alone. He couldn’t bear hearing the answer—whatever answer Leo might give him. It felt like a knife digging into his throat. His breath fled his lungs when Leo finally met his eye, shining in the dim light from the lamp next to them on the table by the bed.

Like this, he thought, Leo looked impossibly younger. Stripped of his armour, and severe Nohrian dress laced up to his chin and wrists, dressed in a less-than-threadbare white undershirt with a high collar. It hung off his shoulder, where Ryoma could see the scar Hans had left on him with their one-on-one fight in Macarath. His trousers hung low on his waist, trailing laces where they were undone. There were dark circles under his eyes, small and barely noticeable, but Ryoma knew they were there. Leo had grown restless the further away they got from Windmire, and since Nestra, he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep.

Seeing his estranged sisters again must have been a worse shock than Ryoma thought.

“How can you trust me, after what your own countrymen did to you?”

“Because he was false, and you are true.” It came out naturally; the truth. Ryoma wondered what had made it seem so hard. “I have never known a truer man. I think if I gave you my heart, you would treat it tenderly.”

He saw the tear that rolled down Leo’s cheek, the first crack he’d ever seen in Leo’s disposition, yet Leo went on; assuming the darkness hiding the evidence for him.

“When you make love to me like that, I can’t think.”

His admission was one akin to guilt, like a criminal confessing his wrongs to court. Leo could not hold his gaze, turning away as Ryoma thumbed at his cheek to wipe the teardrop away.

“Don’t think.” He said simply.

He saw the hesitation—the _need_ for something, _anything_ to be done, flicker across Leo’s face, as war raged inside him. _To accept or to reject?_

“Don’t think.”

“Don’t… toy with me.” Leo sounded weak, winded with breathlessness. Nothing like his usual self in court. “I—have not the means to—” he floundered, his hands balling into fists against Ryoma’s chest. “Defend against this.”

“I don’t toy with you.”

_I never have._

“I—”

“Don’t think.”

It came out a breathless whisper, almost shy, and disbelieving, all in one huff of air.

“ _Kiss me._ ” Leo said, and then flushed. Even now, Ryoma could hear the gears in Leo’s head turning, frantic thinking against what he’d said— _don’t think_ —but he knew he could never get Leo to stop thinking. Even now Leo was fighting with himself about what he was doing, how much sense it made, or if it was the right move to make, constantly playing a game of chess when checkmate had happened far too long ago now to be thinking of new strategies.

His words hung awkwardly in the air, and Leo almost pulled away from him, when he reached for Leo’s hand to press a soft kiss to his palm.

The blond flushed deeper.

“I meant—”

Ryoma leant in to kiss him again, gently. Barely a brush of lips against lips, and yet, as he pulled away, with him pulled a sigh from Leo’s mouth.

“I meant,” Leo whispered.

“Don’t let you think?” Ryoma murmured against his lips, and Leo’s eyes shot up to meet his.

“I haven’t—” he hesitated, as if coughing up gold nuggets of truth was a task nigh impossible to do, before his eyes slid closed. “There had been others.”

Ryoma cupped his hand over Leo’s cheek.

“Lovers?”

“ _Others_.” Leo’s voice quivered, just the slight tremble of a wall crumbling before an earthquake. “Before our time in Fort Dragonfall, I—there had been others. I was…”

Ryoma remembered the way Leo shook under his touch. The way he flinched before letting go, the fear in his eyes before Ryoma kissed the tension away from his lips.

_Scared_.

“Leo, I would never hurt you.”

There, a breath, barely a snort of disbelief from Leo, and Xander’s memory felt like a dagger to his gut.

“I have hurt you before.” He amended, “But never like that. Never like what they did.”

Leo pulled away from him, eyes shining with tears he would not let spill, and Ryoma wished he could wipe them away even before they fell.

“But that doesn’t change that I hurt you.” He continued, and Leo shook his head.

“ _Don’t_.” Sharply, just on the edge of biting.

“No one deserved that. Less of all, you.”

“ _Stop it_.”

Leo hissed like the viper he played in Nohrian court, but Ryoma held his hands, not his aching wrists, where the slave cuff still was, glinting dully in the dim light from outside.

“Is it so hard to hear?” He asked, and Leo looked at him pleadingly. He held Leo’s face again, looking at his wine-red eyes, the same colour as Xander’s, and if he closed his eyes, Ryoma could hear the horror of war still around them, could feel the warmth of Xander’s blood on his hands.

There was a beat of silence, before admission came sounding more of regret than guilt.

“Yes.” Leo said, condemning himself to Ryoma, exposing the deepest secret he had kept blooming as a red rose from his gaping wounds. “It hurts. Your hands killed him—yet you touch me with them, and I love it all the same. You did to me many a first, you brought me pleasure with your mouth, your hands, your cock—but you took him away, Ryoma.”

He lowered his head, pressing it against Ryoma’s chest, sighing shakily.

“You kill me every time you touch me, and I have never felt so alive.”

_Kiss me_ , Leo had said.

Ryoma pulled Leo away from him, his hand sliding up to his nape to tangle with the soft hair there, and pulled his face up to kiss him again. Again, and again, and again, each kiss an arrow, a sword, a dagger, run right through the both of them, painful and bleeding, yet with every brush of skin against each other Leo clung onto him tighter, and Ryoma pressed against him harder, until he had pulled Leo into his lap with his free hand, and the feeling of Leo’s lips on his own felt like a brand that burned his skin.

The need for air made itself known with the burn in his lungs, and Ryoma parted from Leo to watch him pant lightly on top of him.

“You knew who I was.” Ryoma said, “Even in Fort Dragonfall.”

Leo mutely nodded.

“And yet—”

“And yet.” Leo’s voice sounded like a sob. “Prince-killer.”

Ryoma’s hand tightened a fraction of an inch on Leo’s waist.

“Lover.”

Leo’s voice was almost inaudible, murmured against Ryoma’s lips only to be swallowed with a kiss Leo pressed forward to him, as if wanting to bury his confession with their escaping breaths.

Ryoma pulled away from him to breathe, and Leo panted softly, “King Ryoma of Hoshido.”

The blond looked into his eyes, and it made an ache throb in Ryoma’s chest at the feeling of warmth that bubbled from Leo’s expression.

“Make love to me again.”

**Author's Note:**

> again please tell me i should make them fucc, so i don't forget, , , ,


End file.
